


not so weightless (nor whole and unbroken)

by forsyte



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, POV Third Person Limited, Wingfic, brief mentions of, starts pre-canon and ends episode 159, various other characters appear but do not have POVs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23961172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsyte/pseuds/forsyte
Summary: Jon’s wings take longer than they should to fledge. It’s a contrast to everything else about him at this age—horn-rimmed glasses, sweater vests, an air of serious concentration and his ever-present unholy prickliness, like an old man writ into the body of a gangly teenager.--Snapshots, depicting the archive staff in a universe a step to the left.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims (implied)
Comments: 42
Kudos: 217





	not so weightless (nor whole and unbroken)

**Author's Note:**

> _Achilles, Achilles, Achilles, come down  
>  Won't you get up off, get up off the roof?  
> The self is not so weightless, nor whole and unbroken  
> Remember the pact of our youth _  
> "Achilles, Come Down," Gang Of Youths__

Jon’s wings take longer than they should to fledge. It’s a contrast to everything else about him at this age—horn-rimmed glasses, sweater vests, an air of serious concentration and his ever-present unholy _prickliness,_ like an old man writ into the body of a gangly teenager _._ His grandmother is as relieved as she is worried. Jon is more than old enough to fend for himself in his wanderings, now, and he’s not the type to stay out late with friends. Still, she can’t shake the feeling that him being grounded is for the best, at least for now. It has nothing to do with his father, nothing to do with—

(—an accidental fall—)

and she almost believes herself, some days. 

When his adult feathers start to grow in partway through the summer of his seventeenth birthday he takes to picking at them and scowls when she swats his hand away. It’s a miserable span of weeks, him itching all over and her on edge. When it’s all over his plumage is striped and spotted across the backs, dark brown and tawny shading to cream in places, and the white undersides are patterned with watercolor washes of the same deep brown. The edges of the feathers are soft, and make hardly a sound as they move through the air. He looks like his mother—broad wings belying his small, slim frame—and he flies like her too, when he starts, experimental clumsy hops transitioning in a matter of days to short glides and finally, before the summer turns to fall, he’s tumbling his way through the sky, something like joy on his face when he comes through the door with windblown hair. 

His wings look nothing like his father’s.

—

It’s cliche, trite, to call Georgie the wind beneath his wings. They don’t get on at first, til something clicks and he’s tumbling through the air like he hasn’t in ages, something somersaulting in his chest, something that catches the edges of her teasing warmth like thermals and _soars_ —

When they part for the last time he holds onto his anger and pretends the burn of it is anything close to familiar. It doesn’t keep him warm, but it keeps him from falling out of the sky. 

— 

He almost laughs when he sees the job offer, would if he weren’t so busy filling out an application—The Magnus Institute, dedicated to studying the things he’s pursued his whole life, and the symbol chosen to represent it is an _owl._ He’d think it his destiny, if he believed in the concept. 

(Later, much later, he will look back and wonder how much of this could have been avoided.) 

The Institute is large, echoing, some parts of it high-ceilinged enough that he, with his short, rounded wings, can find his way up to the balcony above the library without taking the stairs, stir still air to movement, provided he uses one of the tables as a launchpad, or else powers himself straight up between the shelves. It is a hideously rude habit, and he confines it to the darker hours, when the Institute no longer rings with the footsteps of those who move within it, until he gets careless once, vaults over the railing in single-minded pursuit of research material and comes face to face with—

“Mr. Sims.”

“Mr. Bouchard,” he returns, heart pounding, caught between sick panic and a surprise that freezes him in his tracks, because he doesn’t recall having given his name—? 

The Head of the Magnus Institute seems—amused. Indulgent. “I trust you don’t need assistance finding the stairs.”

He flushes hotly, his feathers fluffing out in embarrassment. “I—no. Thank you,” he bites out, and flees. He doesn’t dare turn around, but he can feel eyes on his back until he rounds a corner.

— 

The Archives are a _mess._ Used to the library, the impeccable system, the bone-deep certainty of knowing where to find the materials he sought, he loses long minutes staring hopelessly at the morass of unsorted statements, of hand-written— _hand-written!_ —letters and neatly typed statements and everything in between. He has assistants, at least, Tim and Sasha and—

 _Martin,_ who he did _not_ pick, and who he despairs of, quite honestly. If it’s not the man’s bumbling attempts at research, it’s him making a mess of Jon’s workspace with his giant clumsy wings, yellow-and-black patterns garish as police tape across his flight feathers contrasted with a plain kind of—tan? Some sort of shade of brown, which seems to elude description, along his marginal coverts where they shade into his scapulars. Jon spits _expressive_ as if it’s a curse, watching his wings flutter like he never learned how to control them. 

Tim is—more manageable, for all he drapes himself across any space allowed him like he owns it, panther-lean muscle exposed by shirts that are just small enough to ride up when he stretches, plumage speckled white across oil-slick iridescence. The effect would be impressive, Jon thinks, if he could be impressed by such. He goes where Jon asks him to and does what Jon—doesn’t ask him to do, actually, his methods being so _unorthodox,_ but he’s quite useful, what with all the information he brings back, so Jon bites his tongue and doesn’t accuse him of being unprofessional, even out of hearing range. 

(“C’mon, boss,” he says once, grinning when Jon takes issue with his—involvements. “Starlings are social birds, it’s in my nature.”

“Said the scorpion to the frog,” Jon mutters, and turns back to his work.)

He’s amiable enough for the both of them, though, and begrudgingly Jon starts to warm up to him, even as it seems Tim goes out of his way to embarrass him at every opportunity. Jon’s never got the point of friendly teasing, much, save for when he was with—

(It’s been a long time since Oxford.) 

He tries to snap at Tim less. The two of them aren’t quite friends, but they’re getting there. 

—

“Do you think he knows what he’s doing?” Tim asks, looking up at where Sasha is diligently stapling papers together. 

“I think he’ll get there,” she answers, tipping her head to the side and shrugging. The movement is echoed and amplified by the sweeps of black and white and teal on her back, magpie wings writ large. They suit her, with her long black hair tied back in a practical braid and her clever black eyes behind practical glasses, especially when those eyes narrow just a smidge in well-hidden mischief that no one ever believes him about. 

She should have got the job and she knows this. She talks about leaving. He tells her he’ll miss her and hopes, selfishly, that her curiosity will keep her here a little longer. 

(It keeps her long enough to tackle him to the floor to the accompaniment of a thousand crushed worms, to grab his wrist and pull him behind her to safety, and then he tells her to run.) 

(And then he never sees her again, but he doesn’t know that until much, _much_ too late.) 

—

“Jon, as your boss, I’m telling you to go home,” Elias says, leaning forward slightly, the picture of benign concern. His wings—some sort of passerine, Jon’s not sure which, striped in sandy shades of tan—shift, rise almost imperceptibly, a perfectly natural gesture. Jon feels, incongrously, pinned.

He is so _tired_ of being scared, and he snaps out _I’m fine_ until Elias backs down and gives his statement. He looks older in this light, the flickering illumination of the fluorescents down here casting the subtle lines around his eyes in stark shadow, and uncharacteristically in disarray, exactly as one would expect from—

_(the bones of her wings were exposed in places, the feathers greasy and tattered and caked with muck and always, always, writhing with things that were not maggots, because maggots only feasted on dead flesh—)_

an encounter with Prentiss, or the crawling rot she left behind. There is no reason to believe Elias is lying. 

Somebody in the archives killed Jon’s predecessor. Elias takes him through the circumstances of her death. The detailed record on tape soothes him somewhat, even as the events themselves remain totally inexplicable.

He is so tired of being scared. 

—

Elias’s wings aren’t much to look at, skylarks not being known for their plumage. Still, he figures it suits him. He loves flying, does enough classwork to keep up appearances and spends the rest of his time in the sky—something about the wide span of air appeals to him. He drifts, for a time, til he settles on an easy research position at the Magnus Institute—a joke of a job, looking into _ghosts_ of all things, but it’s simple enough that he can float through his days half-stoned. 

(The person who looks out from behind his eyes stretches his wings, admires their utter mundanity—the twinge of longing for his previous grandeur eclipsed by the delight of being a secret in plain sight, unremarkable, overlooked.)

(Overlooking.) 

(Far below the Institute, in a room which should not have any light to see by, the massive white feathers of a swan gleam, bracketing the Panopticon’s sole occupant.)

—

“She’s an owl too.”

Martin looks up, startled, to see Tim leaning against his desk, looking…

Well. Happy. Not common these days, especially since he’s facing back towards Jon’s office and has a look on his face like summer holiday’s come early. 

“Who?”

“The police officer,” Tim said, and he looks back down at Martin, and grins, and something in his chest turns over even before he knows what Tim means.

“What does that have to do with anything?” he says, even as he begs himself not to ask.

“You know what they say about people with matching wings,” comes the reply.

“They’re probably just working,” says Martin dismissively, trying to stare a hole through his desk. He clicks his pen a couple of times. 

“Yeah, _working._ All alone in his office, for an hour at a time.” Tim’s eyebrows are impressively mobile. Martin wishes, desperately, that he had learned this under literally any other circumstances. 

“Don’t be gross, Tim,” he says, instead of that. 

Tim’s face falls, just a little, and Martin is abruptly tired of himself. “Any other _hot gossip_ , before _we_ get back to work?” 

“Very professional of you, Mr. Blackwood,” Tim says, giving him finger guns. “And—look, I get it.” 

“Tim,” he sighs, hoping that he can convey _I Do Not Want To Talk About It_ entirely through tone of voice.

 _“Martin,”_ echoes Tim sarcastically. “No accounting for taste, really.” He crosses his arms, sits down on the edge of Martin’s desk, twisted to face him. He looks like he’s a second from waxing poetic about the charms of Jesus Christ to a group of bored teens. He looks like a model for attractively rumpled button-downs. Martin hates him a little.

— 

The things on the back of what used to be (what never was) Sasha can only be charitably called wings at all. Martin doesn’t know whether catching the briefest glimpse of it is better or worse than looking at the thing head-on would have been, and pelting through corridors lit by dim and guttering yellow lights doesn’t give him much space to think about it.

The hallways here are narrow, unsettlingly so. In other places they seem wider than should be possible, but the ceilings are too low to permit flight. The only constants are the carpet, which is always sandpaper-rough; the unsettling effect of the pictures and mirrors on the wall, some of them large enough to look like escape routes; and, more often than not, Tim’s hand wrapped around his wrist, on his shoulder, leading him on, yanking him along as they both run from Michael’s brief appearances behind them. It seems to take delight in tormenting them. Still, the time they spend wandering aimlessly through an endless maze of branching hallways far eclipses the time they spend running. It almost feels worse, after a while. 

Neither of them know how long it’s been when they both, by silent agreement, sink to the floor. Long enough that the need to sleep outweighs the dread of the thing at their backs. 

Martin breaks the silence. “One of us should keep watch.” It’s a practical concern. 

Tim snorts. “And what? Yell if it shows up? What are we going to do, run?”

“Better than just laying down and dying,” Martin mutters.

“I’m not taking point on this,” Tim says, and pillows his head on his arms. It looks uncomfortable. Martin stares at his stubborn form with eyes that are blurry with exhaustion and tries not to think about worms, about being trapped in his flat, about the tunnels Jon might still be in. About the creature that they saw, looking for him. 

Uncomfortable or not, before long Tim is, to all appearances, dead to the world, shoulders rising and falling with each slow breath he takes. His feathers catch the flickering light, throwing it back in strange hues. The effect is hypnotic.

Martin doesn’t intend to fall asleep—it feels as impossible as it is needed—but he opens his eyes and Tim is on his feet, staring down the hall.

He blinks, winces at the taste in his mouth. “What—”

“We need to get moving,” Tim says, still looking back the way they came, and Martin hopes they find a way out soon.

—

If Jurgen Leitner is nothing like Jon expected—broad, would be tall if he stood straight, seeming to bow under the weight of his massive and useless peafowl wings as he glances fearfully from side to side, and Jon stifles a shiver at the thought of being trapped, underground, away from the sky, for so long—the information he brings is even less so. After everything that’s happened, he needs to leave the room for a moment to—destress. After a smoke, maybe things will start to make sense again. 

(More fool him, he thinks, much later. If he’d been faster, if he hadn’t been so easily overwhelmed, if he hadn’t tried so hard for a moment to let the world off his shoulders—)

In the moment, he sees

(blood, first and foremost, and then the body, the rumpled feathers, splashes of red marring decadent blue, the

_oh, God_

his—what used to be his head, a mess, bone shards gleaming)

and fleeing isn’t the sharpest idea he’s ever had, but he’s running on fumes, at the moment.

—

Georgie isn’t the same person as he remembers. Neither, Jon supposes, is he. Her raven’s wings catch the light, don’t quite absorb it, as she crosses her arms and tells him he can stay. Her eyebrows tell him that he’d better have an explanation for her, and the fact that she’s not voicing that demand right now tells him he’s got time. 

He should use it. Should come up with some sort of explanation, some lie that would cover all of his circumstances. He doesn’t know where to start, honestly, because everything—

He doesn’t know where to start. Instead he gazes out the window, wonders, a little, at her no-nonsense attitude being stronger than ever. Wonders if she still flies the same, if anyone else’s seen her flip and roll and fall the way they used to together all those years ago. Probably. She’s always been social. Not as much as Tim, before—

Not like Tim. More social than Jon, at any rate.

She would have liked Sasha, he thinks, unbidden. Finds himself sure of this, even as he’s not sure what the original Sasha was even _like._

Probably didn’t have cuckoo wings. 

— 

“Maybe you weren’t listening,” Basira says, and sighs internally when Martin’s face goes dark. 

He snaps at her—a cheap jab, but still hurtful, and, more to the point, not _helpful._ She needs to find her wayward partner before something happens, and this, this isn’t helping.

“So, you have no idea where Daisy is?” she asks.  
“She’s probably just using her _operational discretion_ to bully someone else,” he mutters. Petulant. Unaware of what he’s just said, the wailing siren of alarm he’s set off.

Daisy told her once, turning a knife over in her hands, that she had tunnel vision just like her wingsakes, that owl eyes were fixed in their heads. That they fixed their gaze on their prey and kept it there. “And you’ve got the voice to match,” she’d added, the corner of her mouth curling up, and that evening found Basira looking up _barn owl vocalizations_ and cursing her partner. It became almost a game between them, after that.

She feels her gaze fix now, the curl of familiar determination she’s been adrift without since she quit the force pushing all other thoughts aside, and she hopes she reaches Jon in time. 

—

In another world, Jude Perry begins her monologue with “If you smother a flame, it dies.”

In this one—

“Have you heard of firebirds?” She doesn’t seem to be waiting for an answer. “I don’t mean phoenixes. Down in Australia, where the flames of wildfires scorch the land to ash, there’s a hawk that _uses_ it. It takes the brush and flies with it and drops it into new territory, watches it take root and burn, and then kills the things that flee from it. It lives and breathes destruction, and it feeds the flame while it’s at it.”

“Go ahead,” she says, and smiles a gleaming smile, and flares her wings wide, showing off feathers of pale ashen tan and charcoal black. “Ask me what I am. Bet it’s not hard to guess.

“The point is, Archivist, you can’t be afraid to _burn._ ”

—

Mike Crew smells of ozone, and the pale scar branded down his neck forks across his feathers, a barely-there pattern of lightness striped across sooty brown, as if bleached there. His wings are unusual, long and narrow—a swift, Jon thinks. 

He’s shorter than Jon expected. It’s not often he finds himself the tallest person in the room. He doubts it’ll do him much good. 

“Hard, isn’t it, trying to ask questions at terminal velocity?” Mike asks, distantly, through rushing wind. Jon can barely hear him, is consumed by the feeling of falling. His wings splay out haphazardly, trying to catch at air which is not moving, and he knows this, but his body—caught in something like a hypnic jerk, one that refuses to end—does not listen.

The minutes pass by, agonizing, as Mike lays out the story of a young boy who lost flight to a lightning strike and was pursued for years afterward, til he threw himself into the thing he craved most as an escape and found it again. The minutes pass by, and every word from Michael Crew’s mouth is something bright and shining in Jon, something he wants almost more than he has words for. 

He finishes, and pauses, says it felt nice, and then Jon is too dizzy with the absence of vertigo to say much at all.

—

To his dismay, he recognizes the woman who comes through the door. Scarred, hair in a tight braid, hummingbird wings folded against her back—he’s seen her before, delivering tapes. Giving him a statement and striding out after she finished, abruptly, as if in retreat. 

She is not retreating now. Detective Tonner turns to him, brushes aside his feeble stuttering, asks “Is this man still human?” 

Fresh off beating a man half to death in front of him, and that’s her first question. He stutters out his answer, almost paralyzed with fear. She speaks over the top of him, rapid-fire, fury in the flex and flicker of her wings, how she prowls through the small space. 

He clutches his stomach, dimly registers “What did I say about questions? I said _turn that off,”_ and the shred of self-preservation left to him reaches out his arm and presses the button on the tape recorder. He doesn’t have time to grab the tape before a grip on his collar yanks him upright, and then he’s stumbling after her on shaking legs.

The gun on her hip is a matte black promise. He doesn’t try to run.

—

“ _Sometimes,”_ Nikola trills, “not being able to see something is actually quite a good thing!” 

There’s something absurd about being so terrified of something with the wingspan of a plastic flamingo and the paint job to match. Everything about Jon’s life is absurd, these days, even being stalked. It doesn’t stop his heart from pounding with sheer terror. 

His throat doesn’t close, and his mind doesn’t blank. He’s past that now. 

—

Michael had wings once, probably. They might have been a handful of colors and stayed that way. They certainly couldn’t have had _claws._

Helen has a pair of wings. Helen has two pairs of wings, has three, has as many as she needs and sometimes, when she forgets, has more, and the feathers are mirror-sharp, and she flares them out behind her and smiles and smiles and smiles. 

— 

Melanie has the wings of a tern, pointed and white and grey, the same colors as her jeans and button-downs and the _Ghost Hunt UK_ sweatshirt she wears sometimes. She’s not much for flashy outfits, doesn’t need them to draw attention when she has her voice and her wits about her. 

Terns are long-distance fliers, migrate with the change of the seasons. Her journey brings her to India, to the writhing mass of a horde of ghosts with no-one else around to direct their anger at. She runs like she never has before, then takes off, frantically, the air whipping around her and filling her eyes with tears until her third eyelid blinks them away. Somehow she doesn’t fall out of the sky when the bullet lodges in her leg. 

—

Going back to the Archives was the worst mistake she’s ever made, wasn’t it, and as she skids her way through the corridors with a knife in her hand, wings half-spread to help her corner, she hopes desperately that she isn’t too late, and then—

No red haze descends over her vision. There is no _music in her ears_ , as she yells and lunges for the grotesque mass of flesh and _(tears it apart, blood on her hands)_ stabs it until it lets Basira go, and as she _(blood on her knife)_ turns to the others and _(cuts through them as if they were butter, blood on her)_ cuts a path ( _hands)_ and spins, and swipes ( _on her knife)_ with her knife at them, it’s just her _and the knife in her hand_ and their skin parting beneath it, this is right, this is what she was made for, this is what her anger has forged her into, _blood on her hands her knife her wings, as there should be._

—She whirls, teeth bared, to face the next threat. The room is empty save for her and Basira. Somewhere nearby, a door slams. There’s blood on her hands.

 _My God,_ she thinks hazily, and _there’s blood everywhere._

It’s hard to relax, after that. Basira wakes her once, carefully, and even so she has to jump back as Melanie lunges for her. She takes to falling asleep behind shelves, stacks of boxes, anything that will afford her any semblance of cover. Her eyes ache with fatigue, but try as she might she can’t shake the feeling that she’s in danger, all the time. Her hands shake when she tries to write. 

One evening, as she contemplates trying to stuff the duvet she sleeps on into an air vent, the distinct creak of a door that isn’t there sounds behind her.

“Hello, Melanie,” says Helen. 

“Not a good time,” she says, in lieu of a greeting. She doesn’t have the energy for one. The hours she’s spent awake have turned her eyelids to granite. It’s a struggle to stay upright, but she can’t lie down. Every time she closes her eyes she starts hearing things.

“You look tired,” Helen notes. “Are you looking for a place to sleep? I can offer one.” 

Melanie crosses the threshold, and an odd clarity shakes her, the feeling of walking into a lion’s den. She can’t care anymore. She’s been awake for far too long, and if Helen wanted her she’s had ample opportunity. 

Helen’s corridors are too narrow to fly in, deliberately so, but she turns a corner and the hallway that stretches out before her—doesn’t open up, so much as it turns out to have been wider than she thought the entire time.

“Sweet dreams,” Helen says, and she almost sounds sincere. 

When Melanie wakes, hyperalert, and leaves through the first door she sees, it’s only the next day. It’s the first full night of sleep she’s got in weeks. 

— 

When Jon wakes from the coma, he looks, more or less, the same. 

It’s Basira who notices that the patterns across his feathers have rearranged. They’re subtle, but if you know what to look for, a hundred eyes draw themselves in dark brown and tawny gold across the span of his wings. 

The Archivist, indeed. 

— 

The light is the first thing that hits Daisy, crawling out of the coffin, and then the fresh air. It feels unreal, feels like a trick, like any moment now she’s going to wake up from whatever cruel dream this is and find herself back underground.

Her muscles betray the lie, though. The way they seize is like nothing she felt in there. Tears spring to her eyes, reflexive, at the pain, and she wishes she could be relieved, ecstatic, but she’s just _hurt,_ and covered in muck, filled with the stuff, her feathers crushed. Her wings feel too heavy to fold, let alone lift. 

She tries not to think about flying. Jon hasn’t let go of her hand, and he squeezes it, now, gently, as if hearing her thoughts. Maybe he is, these days. She waits for the killing urge to seep back into her.

Doesn’t know what to do, when it doesn’t.

—

Peter Lukas is—

Martin searches for an adjective, and the one that won’t leave his mind is _rangy._ Long-limbed, jackal-like, his ever-present coat moving about him as if draped over a patch of fog. His smiles don’t reach his bright, bright eyes, which shine out of the hollows of his face as if those of a starving man. It’s a strange impression, because, taken objectively, Peter is well-fed, his clothes rich, the white and the dark gray of his long, long albatross wings perpetually neatly-groomed, but something about the shadows around him, the way he seems to slide out of nowhere—

The word Martin next finds comes to mind is _hungry,_ and he doesn’t question it. Not when Peter throws an arm around him and the chill lingers for hours, creeps up on him without him noticing and leaves him shivering even when he goes back to his flat to sleep, not when Peter spreads his wings once, casually, and they stretch the length of the hallway. For all he _avoids_ confrontation, cheerfully elides Martin’s pointed questions, there is a desperation about him, one not well-hidden. 

— 

Daisy was a hummingbird, once, gleaming and graceful with blood on her hands, and then she fell into a coffin, came out weak and shaking and flightless. (Grounded might as well be underground, some days, but it’s not like she’s got anywhere to fly to—)

She’s built her strength back up, since then, and when she turns to Basira and asks her to _promise_ , her wings are spread wide, the feathers jagged and warping. She could fly, like this, but she doesn't think to.

— 

_I left the house shortly thereafter and took to the sea,_ Peter Lukas tells the Archivist, and the greatest shame of it is that he does not grit his teeth through every word. The words fall from his mouth easily as oil, slick and bitter-tasting, without even the grace of struggle. His only consolation is one last secret—besides Elias-James-Jonah’s accursed bet—that he manages to keep: the details of the chamber below Moorland House, the mist and fog and—

(crying, curled up below the paltry shelter of his own wings, faded ground pulling at him, til at last a kind of peace settled over him and he accepted it, he looked around with clouded eyes at the beauty of it and felt alone and wild)

(shortly thereafter, a week, maybe, of starving in the chilly nothingness, scratching til the last shreds of keratin fell from sleek primaries)

(—after his first flight, from the ground up, because the only heights were far off in the distance, isolated mountain peaks he could feel but not see, and the still air was impossible to shape so he ran as fast as he could across what might have been wet sand until it fell out from under his feet and he felt the sky below him for the first time)

the awe of it all. The Archivist takes the Tundra from him, the ritual, his failures pulled out one by one like broken feathers or teeth, takes and takes and when he refuses to give further shreds him to static which dissipates into thin air, leaving nothing behind. 

— 

“I see you, Jon,” Martin says, uncertainly, and then he. He laughs, incredulous. For all its softness it cuts through the sound of lapping waves, and then all at once—

All at once, the color creeps back into him. Not all of it, but enough to leave him blazing against the greyness of the place, his red-gold hair, the freckles flecked across his face, his wings alight with sudden vibrancy, yellow and black and a brown Jon still can’t describe, save that it belongs to him. The wings of a goldfinch, he knows now, sometimes linked in symbolism to martyrdom. To persistence.

There’s something like wonder in Martin’s voice when he says, again, “I _see_ you,” and his voice is his own, un-echoed by the lonely mist.

“Martin,” Jon says, and there is no room for anything in him but relief and the edges of a spreading gilded brightness he can’t quite identify, and then Martin is curling forward, hugging himself, his breathing coming faster. There is nothing left for him to do save step forward, giving in to an inevitable pull, and try to breathe through the remarkable sensation of Martin’s hair against his hand, chin settling on his shoulder.

“I was on my own,” Martin says in his ear, almost disbelievingly, shaking against him. “I was all on my own.”

His eyes are still grey, Jon knows, not hazel. He can’t fix everything, can’t undo the days they both spent alone on a diet of thistle seeds, hurt by the very walls around them.

For a start, though, he can see the way out.

“Let’s go home,” he says, and turns, and guides them out of the fog. 

**Author's Note:**

> edit: this has FANART NOW and it is SUPER CUTE and i'm in love, [go check it out](https://possumsquat.tumblr.com/post/618379807187779584/assorted-fanart-for-a-very-fun-fic-i-read-by)
> 
> whoof. it took me, uh, ten days to write this, which is _ridiculously_ fast compared to my usual workflow. that's what writing at the intersection of two hyperfixations does to you i guess!  
> so! **some extra information:**  
>  species:  
> jon: long-eared owl. owls are stereotyped as being wise. they are not particularly. their eyes are completely fixed in their sockets.  
> martin: european goldfinch. associated with the crown of thorns in Christian symbolism; also mentioned briefly in [a poem by keats.](http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=36925) can't take credit for this idea, it was all dysprositos.  
> georgie: common raven. intelligent, often associated with death. look, this is mostly aesthetic.  
> tim: european starling. common birds, but very pretty and very social. have extremely aggressive tendencies.  
> sasha: eurasian magpie. intelligent and very pretty. i fucking love magpies so someone had to be one.  
> sasha: common cuckoo. known for its habit of laying eggs in the nests of other birds.  
> elias: eurasian skylark, from the idiom "for a lark"; another suggestion from dysprositos, who also brought to my awareness the poem "to a skylark" by percy shelley, which ends with the lines _Such harmonious madness / From my lips would flow / The world should listen then, as I am listening now._  
>  jonah magnus: mute swan. thought of as beautiful and regal; irl they are fighty assholes.  
> melanie: caspian tern. this is mostly an aesthetic choice.  
> basira: barn owl. same reasons as jon, more or less. inspired more than a little by [it goes in one ear (and out the other)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21460840), an excellent daemon fic.  
> daisy: hummingbird (no particular species). i figured daisy "pretty name from a scar" tonner would appreciate the juxtaposition of their Hallmark card reputation and their actual behavior (hummingbirds do a _whole bunch_ of mid-air strifing), and making her a bird of prey felt too obvious.  
> jurgen leitner: green peafowl. peacocks have associations with vanity and arrogance.  
> nikola orsinov: plastic flamingo. do not presume to question me  
> michael: hoatzin. to quote wikipedia, "[The hoatzin] is notable for having chicks that have claws on two of their wing digits."  
> helen: [category error]  
> jude perry: whistling kite, one of three species of australian raptors that will deliberately spread fire to flush prey out. it physically pained me to collate them into one species but i Could Not make jude say correct and accurate things about birds.  
> mike crew: common swift. swifts are, well, swift, and very acrobatic on the wing. mike would have been an excellent flier if he'd been a little more fortunate.  
> peter lukas: royal albatross. a little bit a reference to the infamous [Rime of the Ancient Mariner](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834). mostly chosen on account of their primarily solitary ocean-going life.
> 
> -yes, wing plumage is hereditary. no, there is no reason for wings to be emblematic of personality. no, i Absolutely Do Not Care.  
> -in case you were wondering what the fuck the third eyelid is: it's also called a nictitating membrane and it's a sort of inner eyelid which "can be drawn across the eye to protect it from dust and keep it moist."  
> \--  
> that's all, i think! like it? hate it? have prompts for More Content Like This? comments section below, or hit me up at [morguecrow dot tumblr dot com.](https://morguecrow.tumblr.com/)


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